for all of us, even for the guys around the league that Jordan was helping. I prayed that he’d keep them from turning out regretful, like us. Well, like him. I’d stuck around, done my duty….
I covered my eyes. Yuck. There it was, that holier-than-thou thing Shemika was talking about. Why was I like this? Why did I always have to be right? It wasn’t that I didn’t have regrets, too. I had plenty. Jordan was here now and trying to do what was right. I had to find my way out of the past and make peace with that. Somehow.
With Jordan convinced that a shotgun wedding would solve this new problem, the Jericho-and-Shemika problem, it was difficult to deal with him, especially when Jordan hadn’t married his own live-in girlfriend yet.
I reached out and touched Shemika’s stomach gently, thinking about the many women from our church I’d helped through labor. Shemika didn’t really have the look of a woman in labor, but with the young ones it was hard to tell. I once had a girl laugh and talk with me all the way to the hospital and deliver as soon as we got her into a room. This time would probably be a typical first baby, hard and long. Just like mine.
The door creaked open and Jordan entered, taking a few steps and peeking at us. When he leaned over far enough to see my open-eyed stare, he jumped back. “Girl! I thought you were sleeping, too.”
I wish.
“Nope. Just thinking.” I squirmed a little as he looked around my room. I could tell he liked it by the way he narrowed his eyes at the picture on the wall. Some things never changed.
He moved closer to the bed, then settled on a chair in the corner. “Thinking about what?”
“Nothing.” Frustration whistled through my lips. Why did just the sight of him make me angry? Maybe because hard as I’d worked to get these two kids to finish high school, he’d pressed just as hard for them to get married, something I still wouldn’t agree to. Most likely it was because of Shemika’s words earlier, that Jordan’s place was her home. The other thing that bothered me, the thing I wasn’t ready to deal with, was that the grandchild that I’d refused to deal with might be coming.
Soon.
Careful not to wake her, I reached for Shemika’s hand, praying as I touched her fingers. I wasn’t ready for this. I might never be ready. But God was ready. God was here. As I prayed, the soft flesh under her shirt stiffened into a tight ball. Her back arched, but she continued sleeping.
Jordan saw it, too. “Hey, what was that?” he whispered.
I checked the clock next to my bed—11:02 a.m. “That is the beginning of labor. Looks like our granddaughter wants to meet us a little early.”
“So what did the doctor say?” Jordan’s voice went with his feet, pacing up and down my front hall.
“They said to let her rest as long as she can. That if it’s the real thing, it’ll wake her up and we should time the contractions when it does. When they’re five minutes apart, we should bring her in.”
I nodded and started again, puttering around the kitchen, trying to make something to bring along for Shemika to eat. Every doctor was different, but some still believed in nothing but ice cubes and for a long labor that could be torture.
Somehow I sort of felt like that now, pulled by my anger one moment and my happiness the next. Angry yet happy that they’d come here, put me in the middle of it all.
I should have been happy to come home and find my son and people I hadn’t invited inside my kitchen. Throughout Jericho’s childhood, I’d turned the key in my front door every day knowing there’d probably be some child with a problem on the other side. Only this time, it was my child. My problem. And I had no solution. Only hurt and a strange hope, a joy at the thought my grandchild’s arrival remained. The feeling was stronger than I’d expected, but overshadowed by my pain.
Still, it hurt to see my son, so much a kid, trying to be a father, doing what a husband should. It made me want to go upside his head for doing this in the first place. “So you were just going to hang out and hope it stopped hurting, huh son? Sounds like a very well thought-out plan.”
My words came out sharper than I’d liked, but the question rang true. I should have been honored that my son had thought of me first (well, second—he went to his dad first) after all we’d been through this summer, but I wasn’t. I was disappointed. I tried hard not to be, but I was. This just wasn’t how it was supposed to go. God had only given me one child. There wasn’t any room for black sheep and mess-ups. This wasn’t on the program.
I wiped my eyes and kept at the cupboards until I unearthed a can of Chunky soup my son had left behind. I zipped it open with my electric opener and dumped the goo into a pot, wondering if this was how my mother had felt when she’d happened upon my growing belly? Though my mother had split town, leaving me in my aunt’s care long before my first contraction, my current emotions explained a lot. Not enough, but a lot. Maybe one day I’d be as spiritual as Shemika and even be able to defend her. For now, my feelings peaked and dipped all over the chart, resting on happily disappointed.
Jordan joined me at the stove and gathered my free hand into his. My heart did a free fall, like an eaglet tossed out of its nest. In all these months since he’d come back, he hadn’t touched me. I’d made sure of that. Even with all he’d done to me, the physical connection between the two of us hadn’t diminished. From the first time he’d held my hand at one of his father’s Sunday evening fish-fry dinners, Jordan and I were physically drawn together like two magnets on a refrigerator. Spiritually though, our poles had always been opposite. (Now he professed Christ, but loved someone else.) I tried to pull away, knowing better than to let his touch linger.
He held my hand with that loving grip of his and snaked his other hand around my waist, the way he had when I was pregnant. Though my belly was flat now, he rested his hand at my waist, barely touching my dress.
Jordan cleared his throat. “Father God, we haven’t done everything right, but let us get this right. May this baby be a grace to us, a healing. Help me to be to this girl what I wasn’t to Chelle, to Jericho. Help me to be as a grandfather everything that I wasn’t as a father. Help us all to hold together. To be a family. In Jesus’ name, Amen.” As he released me, his mouth brushed my ear.
“Amen.” My knees felt like rubber bands. Jordan’s Halston Z-14 cologne, the same scent I’d bought him for Valentine’s Day our senior year, whispered along my neck, mocking me. I felt God holding me now instead of Jordan, extending an invitation for me to walk with Him, to fly with Him on the wings of the morning, to walk into this grace, this second chance. Instead, I backed away from the pain that was Jordan, who had never been there for me, for us.
Until now.
Before I could melt down again, Jericho tiptoed into the kitchen. “Mom? She’s still sleeping, but I can see the contractions. Should I wake her? What do you think?”
I sighed, again calling upon my birth-coach training for many of the mothers of our church. First labors were always the longest and the worst and Shemika seemed calm so far. “Let her sleep. I think she’s in early labor—”
“Ohhhh.” Shemika’s voice thundered down the hall, sounding more like a moo than anything.
My eyes met with my son’s first and then with his father’s. That sound was one I’d heard before…from my own lips. I bit the inside of my cheek as the memory, the terrible pain, came flooding back. Fifty-six hours of anguish and
